The University of Akron IdeaExchange@UAkron Proceedings from the Document Academy University of Akron Press Managed December 2018 Auto-Documentality as Rights and Powers Ronald E. Day Indiana University - Bloomington, [email protected] Please take a moment to share how this work helps you through this survey. Your feedback will be important as we plan further development of our repository. Follow this and additional works at: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/docam Recommended Citation Day, Ronald E. (2018) "Auto-Documentality as Rights and Powers," Proceedings from the Document Academy: Vol. 5 : Iss. 2 , Article 3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.35492/docam/5/2/3 Available at: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/docam/vol5/iss2/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by University of Akron Press Managed at IdeaExchange@UAkron, the institutional repository of The nivU ersity of Akron in Akron, Ohio, USA. It has been accepted for inclusion in Proceedings from the Document Academy by an authorized administrator of IdeaExchange@UAkron. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Day: Auto-Documentality Recently Michael Buckland (2017) discovered that, presaging the famous figure of the antelope in Suzanne Briet’s Qu’est-ce que la documentation? (Briet, 1951), there was the concept of “autodocument” with the figure of a gorilla in her student Robert Pagès’ work. What this poses in terms of the epistemology of documentation as applied to beings is the possibility that a document is not fully created by documentary primary and secondary ontologies as Briet suggested, but rather that beings, as well as natural entities more fully, also act as self-evidential signs. What powers of being evident exist for the antelope—or any entity—before its capture and cataloging? Can we speak of it being a document outside of documentation? In this paper, extrapolating from my forthcoming book Documentarity: Evidence, Ontology, and Inscription, I’d like to explore such self-evidentiality in terms of human, non-human, and, more broadly speaking, natural entities.1 I’d like to explore this in terms of two analyses: first, that of rights discourses from 17th- century Western Europe onward; and second, according to an epistemology of what the philosopher Rom Harré (1995) has called “powerful particulars.” I will discuss rights through a conceptual-historical notion of rights drift from the beginnings of modernity up until the present time. And I will discuss powerful particulars in terms of dispositional powers and their affordances. I. Natural and Human Rights Most of the history of human moral theory has been about obligation rights, not innate rights of freedom of expression. One was born in a socially or theologically “natural” order and so one had repons-ibilities. One responded to the needs of others within social or theological systems that gave one certain powers or “rights,” or not. Such systems tended to be hierarchical in terms of obligations, though there were obligations in the reverse, as well, if for no other practical reason than that of maintaining the system itself. A citizen-subject was obliged to serve the king, the servant to serve masters, children to serve parents, animals to serve their owners, and aristocrats to serve (in a manner of speaking) the rules of aristocratic behavior, as well as sometimes to be benevolent to those beneath them. The notion of natural rights as rights of powers of expression free from social rules and roles of behavior is a rather unique metaphysical concept, which we see valorized in the writings of John Locke and in the innate or “natural” rights accorded to persons in subsequent national documents, such as the United States Constitution. If obligation rights were defined by powers of service that were accorded to one by assumed transcendental states of being or by more powerful others, natural rights theory from the 17th century onward has stressed powers possessed by 1 I use the neologism documentarity in that book for a specific critical reason that is not fully applicable here, where I use in my title the usual term, documentality. Published by IdeaExchange@UAkron, 2018 1 Proceedings from the Document Academy, Vol. 5 [2018], Iss. 2, Art. 3 individuals, either by their belonging in groups—foremost, the group of human beings—or by being selves with particular innate qualities. They are what we could call expressive rights. Consequently, personal identity no longer simply has been positioned in the grids of moral rules and roles that define social personhood—i.e., being a mother, being a professor, being a doctor, etc.—but rather, it also includes an element of selfhood known by potential and unique powers. It’s important to recognize that this notion of self in personal psychology also came about at the time of the rise of experimentalism. Experimentalism is based on controlling variables in order to allow innate qualities to be expressed. The theory of natural rights as innate powers—dispositions—has analogues in the natural sciences, where innate powers are expressed by entities within given conditions. The common core is the notion that particulars are powerful, at least within certain conditions of expression and certain ways of understanding those conditions. In natural rights theory, the powers of particulars are attributable to some sort of innate powers that are “inalienable,” or cannot be taken away. They are “natural,” in this sense, to the entity involved. Human rights apply to all those entities considered to be human. As we know, this has been anything but an uncontentious concept since the 17th century. For example, during the Spanish and Portuguese colonialism of the Americas, the Valladolid debate (1550–1551) discussed whether the native peoples could be considered to be humans on par with their European counterparts. Mercantile slavery took darker skin–colored African or African descendants to be objects of ownership, akin to farm animals and other tools of labor and trade. Women didn’t have rights to vote in most countries until the 20th century. The spread of inalienable rights of expression and agency across many social arenas has occurred over several centuries. We should also note that modern human rights, following natural rights, has two pillars: freedoms of expression, and more recently, in the post–World War II era, freedom of access to information. The latter is meant to extend the former at the level of governmental information, though with some restrictions meant to keep “state secrets.” States, as human beings, have rights of not only expressive powers, but of restrictive silence upon such within their own documents and upon others. II. Rights of Truth If human rights have spread from being individual rights of expression to being individual rights of access to information in the 20th century, this latter right has spread beyond “information” understood as documents to the international law principle of the Right to Truth. This principle, which is more well known in Latin America and post-Apartheid South Africa than in the Anglo-American sphere, affords relatives of victims of military dictatorships and other “states of exception” https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/docam/vol5/iss2/3 2 DOI: 10.35492/docam/5/2/3 Day: Auto-Documentality within national histories the right to know what has happened to their family members. In principle, it also sometimes allows for the nation as a whole to find out the truth of what has happened. Though the right to truth presupposes documentary evidence, it also demands a broader articulation of the meaning of those documents toward revealing the truth of an event. Rights to truth often occur within contexts of the erasure of events from history. They often occur, as well, in the context of the need to address the past by a need for a future, a future based on confession and sometimes political reconciliation. In Yasmin Naqvi’s words, “the right to the truth stands somewhere on the threshold of a legal norm and a narrative device” (Naqvi, 2006). As such, the right to truth brings into focus the narrative and contextual nature of human rights. Human rights belong to those for whom certain expressions and evidence make sense for others. Speech is a “right” for those who have the apparatuses to speak, but there is no such thing as a right to “free speech” per se. Rather, there is a right to make expressions by whatever means. Speech itself is only inalienable as a physical affordance; meaningful speech (even if a grunt) is a cultural and social affordance, and so this is what its “freedom” refers to. All such expression finds meaning, and also limitations or pressures for limitation, in language acts. This issue becomes even more pressing if we consider the limitations for rights to truth when applied to prehistorical genocides or genocides whose recordings are not in the form of writing, or at least alphabetical writing. Even in the midst of political and social repression, the onus is upon the victims to speak in the terms of the likely victors. Truth, as is often said, belongs to the victors—but not only in terms of documents, and not only in terms of having the last word, but in terms of having the right words, or words at all. If truth is a function of documents, and the nature of documentary evidence, particularly in written form, is limited to the victors, then it is difficult to produce evidence of what happened in any fair manner. Moreover, history itself is often seen in terms of written documents. The right to truth, by bringing documents into a dialectical communicative arena for social and political debate and into the arena of truth tribunals, allows truth to come forward in not only content, but form.